Apple Fusion technology = a combination of an SSD and a hard drive into a single desktop volume in which the system migrates frequently used files to the SSD to enhance performance.

Apple offers the Fusion drive with the new Mac Mini and the new iMac (which ships in December). The speculation has been that the Fusion technology might work with non-Apple drives.

Note that I have not tested an official Apple “Fusion” setup. My goal has been to see if a 3rd-party SSD plus Apple HDD can work.

What I’ve found so far:

Using an OWC 240GB 6G SSD + 1TB hard drive in MacMini, no Fusion “migration” occurs. In short, the Fusion technology does not work with a 3rd party SSD, operating instead as “dumb” JBOD. Apparent reports to the contrary leave me skeptical, or that the model/brand of SSD might matter.

The “special” version of Disk Utility is indeed a new build (444), complete with a bug that is eager to merge two separate internal drives/volumes in a Mac Mini. To erase or verify or repair internal drives, one will have to obtain a non-special version of Disk Utility (build 430), or use the command line 'diskutil' until this bug is fixed.

Other claims based on 'dd'

My testing shows that using 'dd' is a totally inappropriate way to measure disk I/O speed— Disktester reads the same file ~19 times faster than 'dd' (from the SSD or cache, about ~3.8X faster from the HDD).